It will be a vastly different year for the top Savoy women’s side in AWFA competition, primarily because there will only be the one side.

Myrtleford Savoy will only field a team in the senior women’s competition, not opting to field a reserves team due to declining numbers not only at the club but across the league.

It is a disappointing turn of events for the club, whose reserve women’s side won the cup last season, but a massive upside of it is those talented up-and-coming players have a chance to further develop their skills against the best in the region in the senior competition.

Returning co-coaches Tom Scott and Will Robinson-Dunn said the vibes were electric at the club through preseason, and those players who had stuck around were eager for the starting whistle.

“We’ve had a bit of a hit to the numbers this year, we’ve had a lot of girls go into that age group where they’re moving to uni or they’re travelling and finishing school, so we’re down to one team, we’ve just got the senior women instead of the reserve,” Scott said.

“We think we’ve still got highly-skilled players, and we still think we can do something really positive this year, even with limited numbers.

“We know we’ve got a couple of girls returning from overseas mid-season, that’ll give us a good injection of players.

“We’re still optimistic as always, and we know it is a long season, there’s going to be plenty of ups and downs, it’s just part of the process at the moment.”

With reports there will only be eight senior women’s teams in the AWFA competition this season, it means finals are a certainty for Savoy.

Scott said the postseason freedom allowed for a more experimental home and away campaign, a sense of newness which the team had embraced.

“If you’re speaking about expectations, it means we can try different things throughout the year and know we’re still going to be playing finals football, so that’s a good security net,” he said.

“Expectation-wise, we want to find that team cohesion that we know is our brand of football.

“We found it last into last year with the reserve women, we went on an immaculate run, and we know that once we have that across the board, we can play some really competitive football and go all the way.

“It’s more of a matter of finding where we are as a team and what works best for us, then trying to push up the ladder as high as we can.

“I still see us being successful, I still see us having a crack of pushing up mid-table.”